Why would anyone travel from New Zealand to Kansas City, MO? D2WC!

Let me briefly explain: D2WC is a conference about and for designers, developers, hybrid and the famous designer-developer workflow. It will go into its third iteration in 2012 and after Dee Sadler was originally trying to get me involved with the event already in 2010, I finally went in 2011 and had a great time over there (you can find my 2011 talk on Slideshare).

Apart from the fact that D2WC was an excellent conference where I met a lot of inspirational and fun people (including – but not limited to – Dave, Val and Seb) Kansas City was also a very pleasant surprise as a place to hold it and stay for a few days. The city is really interesting and has an very cool mix of beautiful old buildings and new, modern skyscrapers. Besides that I went flying – and even got some proper IFR done while I was there – went to two really good museum and discovered the area around KC a little bit.

Anyway – D2WC is back in 2012 and if you’re looking at the list of speakers on the website you might be impressed. If you’re in the US and involved with design and (web) development or work in hybrid teams, it’s a conference you should seriously consider. Even if you’re overseas, it’ll be a really worthwhile event to attend – trust me and the 7938 miles I have to travel (in a direct line) to get there.

My talk at D2WC 2012 will be about AngularJS – a very, very awesome Javascript framework:

AngularJS for developers and designers

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. This talk introduces AngularJS briefly and will then show why it’s one of the best application frameworks based on the HTML5/JS/CSS-stack out there. AngularJS’ templating system and data binding mechanism usually lead to well defined responsibilities for both designers and developers. While going through the workflow of building an AngularJS app we will have a look at the different interaction points between design and development and you’ll learn how the framework helps both roles to build a well working application as well as how to create clean and maintainable front end markup and code.

I will also offer a 1/2-day hands-on workshop on May 16 (the day before the conference-proper), also on AngularJS:

A better way to build apps with JavaScript: AngularJS

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. With HTML5 currently being overhyped and both Adobe as well as Microsoft turning the back to their former plugin-based poster children Flash/Flex and Silverlight, a lot of web developers ask themselves: “Now what?”. The technology stack of HTML5/JS and CSS will obviously play a more and more important role in the future; the frameworks, libraries and tools we have at hand do not quite compare to what the aforementioned plugin environments can provide though.

This becomes clear in particular when we’re trying to build complex but still well structured applications in HTML and Javascript. Even the use of frameworks such as jQuery, ExtJS etc will in many cases lead to an unfavourable architectural structure. AngularJS tried to overcome those issues and provide developers with an MVC-based architecture, Dependency Injection and Data Binding. The best is – it still works fine in combination with the JS libraries of your choice, there’s no need to drop tools like jQuery.

In this half-day hands-on class we’re going to get you started with application development in AngularJS. You should have a good working knowledge of HTML and Javascript, jQuery experience is useful, but not necessary. Topics will be: Templating, the MVC pattern in general and with AngularJS, Data Binding, View Routing and service and external resource integration.